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Arsenal gunned down in derby stand-off

Tottenham Hotspur 2-1 Arsenal

There is a fantastic conversation, in Issue Four of The Blizzard, between Didier Deschamps and Jean-Claude Suaudeau, where the former World Cup winner (and now France coach), mentions that in today’s game, there are “two zones of truth…if you’ve got a great keeper and a great striker, you’re not that far from victory.” Set against the backdrop of Barcelona’s impending Champions League triumph in 2011, a 3-1 win over Manchester United, Deschamps comments may have come about due to the helplessness one feels when facing the Catalan side. Naturally, Suaudeau, a former coach of Nantes and someone who is from the same philosophical bloodline as Arsene Wenger, disagreed. He said that “a game is won in midfield. Only the midfielders are able to find the right way to play. They are the animators. They are the inspiration. The more players of that kind you’ve got, the more you can hope to win in the long term.”

As it happened, he was proved right, as Manchester United were comprehensively outplayed in the final, suffocated by Barcelona’s asphyxiating press and expert ball manipulation.

Yet, after Arsenals 2-1 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur on Saturday afternoon, it was hard not to side with Deschamps. Had Arsenal had a high-class finisher up front, perhaps The Gunners would have made more of their fleeting but mainly promising forays forward. And between the sticks, if David Ospina had exuded more confidence, perhaps he wouldn’t have meekly flapped at Moussa Dembele’s header before the ball fell to Harry Kane to equalise. At the end of the game, that’s the line Wenger chose to go with, saying that Arsenal gave “two cheap goals away”, the winner from Kane originating from an unchallenged cross from the left-wing.

However, that’s altogether too simplistic a way to explain the result, and conveniently absolves the team from what was a strange performance. Arsenal were out-passed by Spurs, which was not altogether a surprise considering that that’s been The Gunners’ tactic in the last few games: to sacrifice a bit of possession for the good of the team structure. Yet, it was the knock-on effect – what people described as “being out-fought” – that was the most galling aspect of the defeat.

Wenger hit the crux of the issue when he said that once Arsenal went ahead, they “thought too much about defending, and not enough about playing.” In other words, the gameplan which has broadly served them well recently, to stand-off, soak up pressure and keep opponents roughly at hands length, became self-pervading, such that when Arsenal got the ball, possession became almost an anomaly – unnaturally to the overall pattern of the game – and the players were almost dumbfounded with what to do with it. Indeed, they were often so far deep that they were unable to play the ball out, while Spurs’counter-press confounded the misery.

Key attacking players had off days; not least Aaron Ramsey and Santi Cazorla, the midfielders who Suaudeau says set the tone of how you play. In the case of Cazorla, so mesmeric in Arsenal’s recent good form, was harassed each time he got the ball and not even his ambidexterity was able to get out of the swarm of white shirts that surrounded him. Ramsey was even more of a disappointment, either miscontrolling the ball or running into blind alleys. It didn’t help that there was very little structure when Arsenal got the ball, and because they were so deep, relied instead on impossibly quick combination play at the edge of their own to progress up the pitch. It’s no wonder that they resorted to playing long-balls to Olivier Giroud: – which, on another day would have been a perfectly good response to evading Spurs’ press (Ospina to Giroud, 14 times, was Arsenal’s most frequent passing combination). Instead, the French striker increasingly had to funnel deep for the ball and even when Arsenal found him, there was little strategy behind except rely on his muscularity, and hope that Danny Welbeck could neglect his defensive duties for a moment to get close to him. In those instances that he did, he looked dangerous, essentially creating the opening goal with his run, yet on other occasions, his narrow positioning allowed Danny Rose get forward unopposed.

With Arsenal losing so late, it’s understandable that some chose to assign defeat to two errors (though that explanation disregards everything that happened before – namely the pressure that Spurs put Arsenal under prior) and that Deschamps says the two most important players are the goalkeeper and the striker: there’s so much in between that is unknown. Especially considering the midfielders Arsenal had, it’s hard to understand how their considerable know-how didn’t inspire the team, and allow them to pass through Spurs’ first line of pressure. For some, you can pinpoint to Arsene Wenger laissez-faire coaching stylewhich compels the man on the ball to find solutions himself rather than through rigid instruction. For others, it was as simple as key players not “turning up.” That might be closer to the truth. As Wenger says, the way Arsenal play is fragile. “Our game is [about] psychology and the mental aspect. In the final part of the game when the result is not settled, it’s always very important.”

Against Manchester City, Arsenal were the underdogs with a poor record against the top sides, thus had nothing to lose. At Tottenham, the drop-off-and-let-them-have-the-ball strategy conflicted with their underlying philosophy and belief of being technically superior to most other sides. Cautiousness pervaded their whole play such that it becamethe approach. Santi Cazorla, who perhaps symbolises what Arsenal are about at the moment, was the first to be replaced, not necessarily because of his inability to find a team-mate, but mainly because he was far too passive in defence. In that case, you might ask why Wenger didn’t ask his team to push up 10-15 metres up the pitch. The answer is probably that the team didn’t know how to because the pressure from Spurs was incessant.